Mitt Romney Sings America The Beautiful [VIDEO]

Mitt Romney sang America the Beautiful at a campaign rally Monday night, on the eve of the Florida Republican presidential primary.

I love this country. I love its beauty, he said after an enthusiastic crowd joined in on the song's opening lines:

Romney then leads the crowd through a critical breakdown of the 1895 poem, recalling his favorite and admittedly lesser-known lines of the song to engage his constituents: O beautiful for heroes/proved in liberating strife/Who more than self their country loved/And mercy more than life.

He immediately followed with, Do we have any veterans or members of our armed forces? Unfortunately, he misquoted the line, swapping in the modern usage of the past-tense verb proved for the more archaic adjectival use of the original text's prov'd.

Perhaps the viral spread Obama got due to his rendition of Al Green's Let's Stay Together pushed Romney's campaign managers to get him to sing. The Washington Post points out Romney's been quoting lines from America The Beautiful for a quite a while without actually breaking into tune.

Reporters could not recall another instance when a presidential candidate performed a song on the eve of an election, Philip Rucker wrote.

This might give him some final web traction on the day of Florida's primaries.

The Daily Mail reported sales of Al Green's Let's Stay Together jumped almost 500 percent after President Obama sang that song at the Apollo theater on Jan. 20. A poll on NPR shows readers prefer Obama's pipes to Romney's by a margin of almost 10 to 1, at the time of writing this article. Objectively, I have to agree; Obama just sounds more liquid. I'd like to see Romney's near-to-square-wave Tabernacle pipes hit that flip Obama pulls off in his Green rendition:

Also I can't tell if this is real but this is what George W. Bush might look like singing The King: